Erica StanfordStoring Your Crypto Assets Securely with Hardware Wallets
Updated: Nov 17, 2025
Cryptocurrency scams are all over the social media and.. well, already a part of everyday news. Scammers are getting more creative utilising not just your email, but Facebook with fake live events, Twitter and other social media sites to hook potential victims. They send out viruses that target your private keys — recognising them and sending them directly to these hackers.
Hardware wallets provide a great defense against these attacks by preventing your private keys from ever leaving the device.
Popular hardware wallets include:
BitBox
Great hardware wallet choice for casual cold storage, with this small USB-C solution containing a tiny screen and a great companion app for digital asset management
Only one model at the moment, the BitBox02, available for around £100
Very discreet and doesn’t look like a typical hard wallet
MicroSD compatible
Sold in over 100 countries by Swiss company ShiftCrypto
Advanced users can make an easy connection through the BitBoxApp to their own Bitcoin full node, meaning nobody will see your transactions
Users can even connect to privacy wallets like Wasabi and Samourai and use a coin control feature to manage their transactions
Thanks to a secure chip feature, BitBox02 offers fully open-source firmware, which neither Ledger nor Trezor provides
Great choice for beginners who want to keep things simple
Cobo Vault
Cobo offers three very cool hard wallets, the Essential (£85), the Pro (£120), and the Ultimate (£340)
Cobo Tablet is another product offered for security purposes, but rather than being a wallet for cryptocurrencies, it’s a military-grade steel device used to store only your recovery phrase in case you lose your private keys
The Essential and the Pro are pretty standard hard wallet devices, being air-gapped, secure, and with small touch screens
The Ultimate is one of the most serious wallets in the industry, built with institutional investors in mind, it offers features like a self-destruct mechanism for physical brute force attacks, impact resistance, military-grade durability, an aerospace aluminium body, and more
Only supports 10 different cryptocurrencies, although they are 10 of the most popular and commonly held coins
Coinkite ColdCard
The Bitcoin-only hardware wallet of choice for those who want high security and are a little bit paranoid about hackings
What this device lacks in aesthetic design, it makes up for with immense security features, including the ability to never, ever, connect it to a computer
A ColdCard from Coinkite costs around £85
Features an OLED display and a numeric keypad
Based on open-source software
Some people are concerned that even a USB charger can be compromised now, so the ColdCard can be powered by a 9V PP3 battery to avoid that issue
CoolWallet
Rather than looking like an MP3 player or a USB stick, CoolWallet has created a new concept for hard wallets, designing a device that is the size and shape of a credit card
Being able to slot the device nicely into your leather wallet allows for ultimate convenience, especially for those who need regular access
The card can be charged with a USB cable, and despite its size, still offers a small LED screen and Bluetooth connectivity!
The Binance Chain CoolWallet (£70) is a great collaboration device that has integrated Changelly and Binance DEX to make trading even easier
The premium device is the CoolWallet Pro, available for £105. What separates this from the CoolWallet S are the increased security features and the ability to stake your coins and earn interest on them
KeepKey
Photo courtesy of masterthecrypto
At just £35, KeepKey is one of the cheapest hardware wallets on the market
Supports over 40 different mainstream cryptocurrencies
The development company behind Keepkey was purchased by cryptocurrency exchange Shapeshift as they looked to bolster security and create a hardware wallet that could handle internal cryptocurrency conversions. This saves users from having to transfer the coins to a cryptocurrency exchange manually
Offers a large screen display so that all information about the stored crypto can be easily seen
A recovery process gives KeepKey owners a chance to recover their private keys with a security phrase
The KeepKey wallet can be connected with a cable to a computer and synchronised with the ShapeShift Platform, a web-based visual interface that allows users more functionality over their coins
Ledger
Photo courtesy of masterthecrypto
Supports at least 1,200 cryptocurrencies, with 22 popular coins compatible, plus all major ERC-20 tokens
Ledger Nano X (£110-120), Ledger Nano S (£50-60), and Ledger Blue (£250) are the three hardware wallets sold by Ledger
Nano X offers Bluetooth capability and state of the art security
Nano S is a simpler device for those with more casual security needs
Ledger Blue offers a great touch screen and high-quality device design
Ledger Live is a software product used by all devices on a computer to allow you to interact with your funds and perform transactions
The security rating of these hardware wallets is superb but even Leder admits that despite spending millions trying to make them completely unhackable, if an expert hacker has physical access for enough time, they may be able to find an exploit. For this reason, Ledger offers a bounty program, offering friendly hackers financial rewards for discovering flaws
NGRAVE
Marketed as ‘The coldest wallet’, the NGRAVE ZERO (£275-£345) uses one-way QR technology to avoid the need to connect your device to a computer or to the internet
Incubated by imec, one of the world’s top security research firms
You’ll never have to worry about compromised software, so far, the NGRAVE ZERO has proved unhackable, giving the company a stunning reputation for digital security
The device comes with a secondary product, the ‘Everlasting Backup’, which consists of two fire and water-resistant stainless steel sheets that contain your seed phrase. This two-part NGRAVE GRAPHENE product is unlike any other seed recovery ‘device’ on the market
New entrant to the hard wallet market, NGRAVE is expected to become a major competitor to Trezor and Ledger in the coming years
NGRAVE is an island, unreachable by man…
Trezor
Photo courtesy of masterthecrypto
Supports more than 1,000 cryptocurrencies
Trezor One (£40-50) and Trezor Model T (£150-180) are their two hardware wallet options, both of which look like something of a hybrid between a car key and a USB stick
Czech company Trezor are the inventors of the hardware wallet, turning their concept into a globally successful product, with many competitors attempting to outdo their initial invention
Arguably the most secure hardware wallet on the market, though expert hackers have been able to gain access using brute force techniques and specialist tools